How many keywords should you track? It’s a tough question. In fact, many digital marketers aren’t sure where to begin to answer it. For a subject as mission-critical as keyword strategy, that’s a problem.
After all, keywords are the fundamental units of SEO success. They’re what inspire our content, define our site optimizations, and land us those coveted top rankings.
So a key decision to make at the start of any SEO endeavor is which terms to surface in a keyword index (a giant directory of popular keywords and the URLs that rank for them) and which keywords to actively track.
It’s the difference between looking someone up in a phone book and hiring a private detective to tail their every move.
Not this guy though. His hourly rate is bananas.
Both approaches have merit, but they’re not equivalent, and deciding when to apply which tactic is a crucial business decision for anyone looking to get serious about SEO.
So what is a keyword index?
A keyword index is an ocean of keywords that marketers can tap into to research what domains and pages rank for a given keyword. Not all indexes are created equal. For instance, they vary widely in size — some are as small as 60 million keywords, while the largest, SEMRush, has over 300 million worldwide at the time of this writing. Their refresh rates vary widely as well; when choosing which index you want to use, it’s important you have access to frequent refreshes, whereas some will give you data that’s 30 days stale.
When to avoid a keyword index
An easy mistake to make is relying too much on a keyword index for terms you ought to be tracking. Keyword indexes are best for researching what type of content ranks well for various terms — if you want to go shallow and wide, an index is the right tool. But they have limits.
For example, an index doesn’t know who you are; you’re buying the exact same data that your competitor is getting. And because an index doesn’t integrate with your analytics, reporting is all but impossible.
There’s also no option to group together content, which means you can’t see how your business performs in a single product category vs. your competitor’s offering. If you try to see how you perform in the TVs & electronics category against Amazon, you’ll end up seeing all the keywords Amazon ranks for. And as a result, indexes have a lot of noise covering up the signal. You’ve got to dig through a lot of data to get to the best insights.
But tracking keywords is an investment. So how do you know when that investment will pay off?
Track keywords… if you’re ready to grow your brand
The point of SEO is to grow your business, and that often means growing your brand. But an index doesn’t care about your brand, no matter how well-crafted it may be. If you’re Nike, and you’re releasing 100 new shoes a year, none of them will show up in an index. If they do, it’ll be six months too late. Indexes are fundamentally blunt instruments; keeping on top of branded terms requires a finer tool.
Pictured: a Keyword Index.
Track keywords… if you want to be proactive
Whether you’re a scrappy startup following the maxim of “move fast and break things,” or an established Fortune 500 company with a sterling brand, you need a proactive strategy — to set your path in advance and handle obstacles along the way.
Indexes, by contrast, are fundamentally reactive tools, especially those that refresh monthly. If you want up-to-the-minute data on your digital performance, tracking is the way to go. It’s tracking keywords that enables features like Conductor’s Insight Stream, which surfaces opportunities before they’ve passed you by.
Track keywords… if you want to go mobile
With more than half of all Google searches now happening on a mobile device, tracking keywords on desktop alone isn’t enough. But the technical structure of mobile data is inextricably linked to location data — something indexes don’t have. As a result, the mobile data you get from an index will always be incomplete.
It’s no use to you now.
Track keywords… for reporting on dollar value
Content ROI. Who doesn’t love it? But it’s trickier to pin down than we’d like. Luckily, tracking keywords makes it easy to track the ranking of revenue of all your content, so you can concretely report on the dollar value of your efforts.
Then you get to do this.
On Conductor’s side of things, we break this data down in Page Insights, a detailed dive into how rankings change over time, and all the revenue those pages bring in. This allows for a neat visualization of long-term progress that can be reported on across an org.
Track keywords… for global insight
For enterprise organizations with a global presence, detailed location data is crucial. If you have business units across the globe, you’ll likely want local data on each locale so you can see which areas are paying off and which need more attention.
Low global visibility is bad for business.
An keyword index’s limited location capacity won’t cut it for a global enterprise-level business. To go wide, it’s time to track.
Tracking thousands of keywords can be daunting, but when done right, it can have major payoffs for your business. At the same time, a keyword index can be an invaluable research tool for ideating on content and getting a quick snapshot of the marketplace. The trick is to know when to use which tactic, and when to trade off; that way, you’ll be well on your way to a killer SEO strategy.
Keyword research doesn’t have to be costly or a pain. Check out our new mobile app which gives you free access to the keywords your customers are using.
Source: Conductor Spotlight